Taking account of the dramatic shifts in the make-up and educational and social needs of today's college students, the authors explore how to steer future reforms in ways that will advance goals related to equity and educational quality. The chapter begins with an overview of the major trends in who today's students are, what we now know about teaching and learning that advances equitable student success, and the changing global economy and workplace. Building on that analysis, the chapter explores the strengths and weaknesses of unbundling and proposes a potential new avenue for reform in liberal arts colleges making use of both unbundling and “re-bundling” of educational experiences proven to advance quality and equity.
TopA Compelling Need For Change
Across nearly every sector of American life, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed problems and accelerated trends that are affecting society significantly – for good and ill. In higher education, the forced shift to remote instruction highlighted profound inequities in the lives of today’s students. Some lacked housing security or access to broadband internet. Others endured challenging life situations that remote learning both revealed and often compounded. But the shift to remote teaching and learning also brought long-overdue attention to instructional designers and online learning experts. These professionals stepped up to help others design better learning experiences in the light of the challenges faced by students and professors.
Even before the pandemic, several trends in higher education had been pushing institutions toward reform. Advocates sought improvements in the design of programs, student support systems, and institutional business models. Such changes are clearly needed to serve a markedly different population of students and a new economy—one that requires wholly new talent pipelines. These challenges and opportunities are now nearly universal. While there had been conversation, even prior to the pandemic, about larger institutions and those providing exclusively online learning addressing these issues, we now see institutions of all sorts navigating these issues. Across the sector, the pandemic has accelerated these trends.
The question now is: How can we steer these accelerating trends and use the lessons learned during the pandemic to prioritize a commitment to quality, equity, and purpose? And how might we think about these lessons across institution types, from large research universities to small liberal arts institutions? We must reform our institutions to better serve today’s students. We must prepare students to thrive through leadership in a dynamic, knowledge-based, technology-dependent economy. We must equip them to help bolster a fragile and fractured democracy in a global community facing unprecedented challenges.
But if we are to chart a productive course for higher education reform, we must more fully understand four of the longer-term trends affecting all of higher education that accelerated during the pandemic.
Confidence and Enrollment Trends
For many years, public confidence in higher education has declined, as has overall enrollment—especially of traditional-age students. Much of the drop in enrollment in some states has been caused by regional demographic shifts, but declining confidence in institutions of higher education is a likely factor in most states. Only about half of American adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2019 believed that higher education was having a positive impact on the country. About four in ten (38 percent) said the sector was having a negative impact—up from 26 percent in 2012. A 2018 Pew survey found that more than 60 percent believed higher education was heading in the wrong direction (Parker, 2019).
The impact is not limited to enrollment. It is a matter of record, reported by The National Student Clearinghouse, that students are voting with their feet—responding to real and perceived challenges related to college costs but also to the basic demands of life and the pandemic’s impact on their mental health and well-being. The Clearinghouse reports a nearly 8 percent decline in undergraduate enrollment since 2019 (National Student Clearinghouse, 2021). There have been steep enrollment declines at community colleges and for-profit institutions, particularly during the early months of the pandemic. More recently, similar declines have hit public four-year institutions. A recent survey found that nine in ten college students believe there is a mental health crisis on college campuses. Seventy percent say they, themselves, are experiencing pandemic-related distress or anxiety (TimelyMD, 2022). This trend – beginning before the pandemic and accelerating during it – occurs just as the economy demands a much more highly educated workforce.